Wednesday, December 23, 2015

Intellectual Perestroika - a radical idea

In my wilder moments I dream of sweeping the board clean. I dream of demolishing most of the concepts, categories and nomenclatures we have built up over the years. I dream of building up from scratch, to gain a more politically efficient view of the struggle, and where we stand, and what is to be done.

In short, I dream of intellectual perestroika.

Our struggle - let's just call it "the resistance" - has been a chaotic affair. Yes, it has settled into an ordered system, but that system is constrained by the legacy of our early political ignorance, from a time when we were groping in the dark without a map. Hence, we are now operating under the burden of a flawed design which is properly no design at all. It just happened.

To begin: it was a mistake to label the resistance as a so-called "men's movement". This, admittedly, is insight by hindsight. How could we have known, way back then, what we know now? We couldn't have. We had to run the experiment and see what came out the other end - there was no other way.

But the point is, that now we know better - or at least we ought to know better. For example, in the earliest days we had not yet formulated gynocentrism as a concept. But with the benefit of this concept, we know that anything bearing the motif of men's rights or male issues is a political slow starter, an overloaded truck lumbering up a steep mountain road. Repeated observation has confirmed this.

A related idea, less talked about but equally important, is the androcentric narrative voice.  Another name for this would be the "male clubhouse perspective". I am forever meeting  men who bemoan the male condition from a subjectively male standpoint - as members of class male. 

Mind you, this is not a bad thing. There is nothing morally amiss about it. My objection is that it's politically inefficient, meaning that there is something operatively amiss about it. To be an efficient political operator in the realm of public rhetoric, one should not speak from the male clubhouse, but as a reasoning voice on planet Earth - a universal philosopher of the human condition.

Feminism is, frankly, no good for anybody - and the good news is, that a lot of people are waking up to this. These are the people you must reach, and you won't do it by sitting in the male clubhouse lamenting the male condition, or whining about "the friend zone" and similar crap. This will only land you in the feminist dung-wrestling zone - but you've got to be way more clever than that! You've got to separate the personal from the political, and you've got to stay on-message.

If you make feminism's wrongs the focal point of your public rhetoric, and galvanize the world with a knowledge of those wrongs, men's rights can easily roll right along on the highway you are building.

Men's rights and men's issues will not be lost or forgotten. Intellectual perestroika will bundle them along with everything else, but the skin which wraps around the bundle will be something altogether different.

As for MRA, MRM, PUA, MGTOW, masculinist, manosphere and all the crumbling semantic stonework of the legacy discourse: why not swing a wrecking ball through the lot of it? From the rubble, we can pick the choice bits and incorporate them into something new, then sweep the rest of it over a cliff. . . .

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